Amrish Rau, CEO, PayU India’s keynote focused on the need for digital payments to make the checkout process easier for customers. With everyone becoming both buyers and sellers, P2P payment is only set to increase. As UPI tries to make payments seamless like messages, PAYU wants to connect business and these messages together, he said.

So what needs to be solved for bridging the scale gap?

The panelists then spoke about the issues that need to solved for merchants – access, onboarding, and support with reliable ways of getting transactions through and providing error code reporting. The concern they shared is that many merchants, after the initial digital push, seem to have shifted back to cash again. So, unless the merchant issues are solved, scaling digital payments will be tough.

UPI- the end-state vision:

As payment disruption shifts to banks, to technology firms and telecom firms with UPI potentially carrying more money than payment gateways in the future, the panel visualized the possible end-state – UPI enabling a newsvendor to collect money due to him without knocking on anyone’s door. For those interested in more details, please read our view of the sector here: (link to article).